The Combine That Was Still Running

You learn fast in a derby. The ones who go after everything wear out first. Dad’s combine was not fast, and it was not big, but it was steady, and I kept it moving and kept the back end toward trouble and the drive wheels away.

At one point a big gray combine, newer than ours, caught me square from the side, and the whole machine rocked up on two wheels and came down hard. My teeth clacked together. Dad’s cap jumped on the seat and stayed.

I looked over at the pits and saw Bo standing on the cattle panel with both fists in the air.

After the first heat, there were four left running. They gave us ten minutes in the pits.

Dad’s crew came over the fence like they were twenty years old. Before I could even get down the ladder, there were six old men around the combine, looking at every inch of it, talking low.

One of them found a hydraulic line weeping where it had been pinched. Another had a hose clamp in his shirt pocket, of all things, and handed it over. Bo had it fixed in four minutes.

Mahlon did not get off his bucket. He did not need to. He just sat there and called out things to check, one at a time, and the men checked them, one at a time. Brakes. Belts. Battery strap. The plate behind the radiator.

“It’s holding,” one of them called back.

“Course it’s holding,” Mahlon said. “Bo welded it.”

Idella came over to the bottom of the ladder and handed up a bottle of water so cold the plastic was sweating. “You drink all of that,” she said. “Your dad would have my hide if I let you go back out there thirsty.”

Then the horn blew and it was time.

There were four of us left when they waved us back out. The big gray one. A rust colored one with a lot of steel on it. A little old green one that was not ours, painted a different, lighter green. And Dad’s.

The second heat was meaner. Everybody was tired and everybody’s machine was hurting. The rust colored one went after the little green one and they locked up together in the middle of the arena, and neither could get loose, and the judges called them both dead.

Then it was the big gray one and me.

The gray one came at me twice. Both times I backed into it, rear end first, the way Mahlon said. The second time something on the gray one gave with a bang, and smoke rolled out of its engine compartment, and it limped about ten feet and stopped.

The driver tried to restart it. It turned over and turned over and would not catch.

I backed away and swung the combine around in a wide circle through the dirt, slow, the way Dad used to swing it at the end of the field. The whole arena was in front of me.

Two combines sat dead in the dirt, smoking lightly in the sun. The others were already parked against the barriers. And Dad’s green combine, dented and dusty, with Bo’s cage and Dad’s paint and Dad’s cap on the seat, was still moving.

I could not stop grinning. I could feel the dust on my face turning to grit in the heat and I did not care.